Inside the new Seattle Art Museum: Free zone and art ladder

Location: First floor south

By REGINA HACKETT, P-I ART CRITIC

Updated 10:00 pm, Thursday, May 3, 2007

Cai Guo-Qiang's "Inopportune," including an airborne fleet of seven cars that shoot out rays of colored light as if exploding, makes a bold statement about today's world.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Cai Guo-Qiang's "Inopportune," including an airborne fleet of...

Kim Leary checks out her video image while walking through the "Cartoon Forest," Jason Puccinelli's installation on the "art ladder," formerly the grand staircase, in the Robert Venturi-designed south building.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art didn't charge admission when, deep in the Depression, a teenage Jacob Lawrence could walk down from Harlem any time he felt like it to study the art, especially the small, medieval paintings, without spending a dime.

There's value in that.

Instead of a free Seattle Art Museum, however, there's a free sculpture park and a sizable free zone: two floors of art derring-do and other visitor enticements.

The most dramatic of those enticements can be seen from First Avenue: Cai Guo-Qiang's airborne fleet of seven white cars, with an eighth to mark a beginning and a ninth at the end, parked quietly on the ground. The airborne shoot out rays of colored light, as if exploding.

Titled "Inopportune," the piece was commissioned by MASS MoCA in 2004 and is now owned by SAM. In Seattle last month, China's Cai said through an interpreter that he was thinking about suicide bombers, about how terrorism takes place in the middle of an ordinary day, and how we go on afterward. Beyond that unsettling thought, he said he wanted viewers to feel they are traveling through an illuminated Chinese scroll come to threedimensional life.

Even more spectacular is Cai's 50-foot-long video, "Illusion." In it, cars become firecrackers exploding in Times Square. Nobody notices. Crowds pass in and out of the smoky light as if nothing happened, because for them, in their own private worlds, nothing has.

Beside the elevators is a small gallery featuring the paintings of Margie Livingston, this year's Betty Bowen Award winner. On Robert Venturi's staircase, now the "art ladder," Jason Puccinelli parked a painted forest. Look up and see yourself amid the trees.

The forest is fun but crowds Richard Long's mud wall, fortunately still there after the remodel. Better are Puccinelli's murals at the top of the stairs, a child whose open mouth is a room, and a hallway that terminates into a giant eyeball.

DON'T MISS: Cai's video "Illusion," with its profound understanding of human suffering, and, on a lighter note, Jeffry Mitchell's floral mural in the separate room for large groups in the cafe. If Jean-Honoré Fragonard rose from the dead, this is where he'd eat.